Converting date to a varchar using "like" in pl/sql - plsql

Question

I need to go through few millions of data searching for a year sent as a parameter to a method. The year comes as a varchar.
This is the query I'm working with
SELECT X,Y
FROM A
WHERE mch_code = 'KN'
AND contract = '15KTN'
AND to_char(cre_date, 'YYYY') = year_;
cre_ date is of type date and year_ is from type carchar.
when performing this query it take around 25 minutes to process it completely.
Is anyone knows about a different approach to find out the quick execution.
Please help.
This didn't work out.
SELECT X,Y
FROM A
WHERE mch_code = 'KN'
AND contract = '15KTN'
AND cre_date LIKE '%2013';
The reason might be 'cre_date' and '%2013' are of different types

Answer 1

If you have an index on (mch_code, contract, cre_date) columns, you can improve performance by doing something like:
select x, y
from a
where mch_code = 'KN'
and contract = '15KTN'
and cre_date >= to_date('01/01/'||year_, 'dd/mm/yyyy')
and cre_date < add_months(to_date('01/01/'||year_, 'dd/mm/yyyy'), 12);
Even better would be to declare the start of the year as a DATE variable prior to running the sql, eg:
v_year_dt := to_date('01/01/'||year_, 'dd/mm/yyyy');
which would make the query:
select x, y
from a
where mch_code = 'KN'
and contract = '15KTN'
and cre_date >= v_year_dt
and cre_date < add_months(v_year_dt, 12);
If you don't have an index on those three columns, you could create a function based index on (mch_code, contract, to_char(cre_date, 'yyyy')) that should help speed up your query, depending on the percentage of rows you're expecting to select. It may help even more if you added the x and y columns into the index, so that no table access was required at all.
Alternatively, you could think about partitioning the table on cre_date, monthly or yearly.

Answer 2

The reason your query is slow is that you're applying a function to a column on every row in your table. Let's try it another way:
SELECT X,Y
FROM A
WHERE mch_code = 'KN' AND
contract = '15KTN' AND
CRE_DATE BETWEEN TO_DATE('01/01/' || year_, 'DD/MM/YYYY')
AND TO_DATE('01/01/' || year_, 'DD/MM/YYYY') + INTERVAL '1' YEAR;
This eliminates the need to apply a function against every row in the table, and should allow any indexes on CRE_DATE to be used.
Best of luck.

Answer 3

You can try with EXTRACT function:
SELECT X,Y
FROM A
WHERE mch_code = 'KN'
AND contract = '15KTN'
AND EXTRACT(YEAR FROM cre_date) = year_;